Author: Peter

General Park Chung-Hee’s May 16th, 1961 coup d’etat was perhaps the single most important event in South Korean history since independence in 1948 (see also post-53 and post-54).

General Park successfully seized control of Seoul in the pre-dawn hours. Victorious, he posed for photographs that very day in front of Seoul City Hall:

See the wooden doors in the back at left, in front of which five soldiers are standing? You can easily stand in front of these same doors, even 53 years later. These were the front doors to Seoul City Hall.

Here it is today. See the same doors?

That black building behind is the New City Hall (2008 to present). The front building, the former City Hall (1928-2008), is now a museum and/or library. The huge grassy area in front of both is frequently used for events.

But why did they make the New City Hall such a weird shape?

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My impression is that they thought it looked sleek and futuristic and thus symbolized a new Korea.

A tidal wave of futuristic fury, splashing over the dusty-looking old City Hall. That’s how it looks to me. I interpret it to be meant as a metaphor for South Korea moving into a new world, washing away its historical “baggage” of War, Dictatorship, Terror, Foreign Occupation, and Economic Misery. Those are things that Koreans feel defined the majority of the period during which that stone building served as City Hall. All have been washed away by the unstoppable tide of Korean progress and advancement towards status as a global leader (…is the idea).

Certain angles make this “tidal wave” visualization very clear:

The opening of the New City Hall also coincided with the 60th anniversary of South Korea’s foundation (Summer 1948). This summer (2014) will mark 66 years of independence.

Here is the “The Ballad of Forty Dollars”. The song reminds me of the Iowa I knew in the 1990s, when I frequently visited there (my father’s place of birth). Lyrics below.

The tune, the lyrics, the “Americana”; all are appealing.

I like that it tells a story. I just can’t figure out “the moral of the story” (if any). Can you?

The Ballad of Forty Dollars
The Osborne Brothers [1972]

     Well, the man who preached the funeral
     Said it really was a simple way to die

     Well, he laid down to rest one afternoon
     And never opened up his eyes

     They hired me and Fred and Joe
     To dig the grave and carry up some chairs

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     It took us seven hours
     And I guess we must’ve drunk a case of beer

     I guess I oughta go and watch them put him down
     But I don’t own a suit

     Anyway, when they start talking about the fire and hell
     Well, I get spooked

     So I’ll just sit here in my truck
     And act like I don’t know it when they pass.

     Anyway, when they’re all through
     I’ve got to got to work and mow the grass.

     Well, here they come
     And who’s that riding in that big old shiny limousine!

     Mmmm…Look at all that chrome
     I do believe that’s the sharpest thing I’ve seen

     That must belong to his great-uncle,
     Someone said he owned a big old farm

     When they get parked, I’ll mosey down and look it over
     That won’t do no harm!

     Well, that must be the widow in the car
     And would you take a look at that!

     That sure is a pretty dress,
     You know, some women do look good in black

     Why, he’s not even in the ground,
     And they tell me that his truck is up for sale

     They say she took it pretty hard,
     But you can’t tell too much behind the veil

     Well, listen ain’t that pretty
     When the bugler plays the military taps

     I think that when you was in the war
     They always try and play a song like that

     Well, here I am and there they go
     I guess you’d just call it my bad luck

     I hope he’ll rest in peace
     The trouble is, the fella owes me forty bucks!

Fate decreed that I shouldn’t have even one minute of downtime in the wild month of February 2014, which started for me in an airport (see post-204) and ended at a bus station, where I collected my friend J.S. (of Roanoke, VA)

We finished our post-CELTA celebratory events about 11:20 PM on Friday Feb. 28th (see post-200). To the subway. On to home, for the others. Not me. For me, it was on to the bus station. There, I found a recently-arrived J.S. leaning up against a post, backpack at his feet. It was 11:55 PM. As the clock ran out on the month of February, J.S. and I were maneuvering down into the subway. Back to Arlington. Sleep.

J.S. wanted to see the original U.S. Constitution and Declaration of Independence.

Into the Metro again, in the morning:

Out of the Metro. We found the “Clinton Building”. There is a Clinton Building? There is. I see that it was named in 2013. “Payback”, I’d guess, for Republicans putting in a Reagan Building.

The Archives is (are?) nearby.

This was also my first time seeing the founding documents of the USA, even though I was born and raised just a few miles away. They’re right there (at the National Archives, near the U.S. Capitol).

Here is the very romanesque front of the National Archives:

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We found the room housing the Declaration of Independence, the U.S. Constitution, and the Bill of Rights. A quiet piety dominates that giant, dimly-lit room. The feeling is equal to walking through a religious sanctuary.

It seems to me that very many Americans feel that the Declaration of Independence and so on are, at some level, “sacred”, even “divinely inspired”. In a much more primitive society, maybe we would actually worship Jefferson and Washington and so on, as gods, today. The feelings people have towards them “draw water from the same well”.
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J.S. posed a good question: If what they have on display is the “original” Declaration of Independence that was sent to the King in 1776, to legally secede from the British Empire, “how’d they get it back?” I have no answer.

J.S. went off to look at other exhibits. I spent a considerable amount of time slowly reading a replica of the Declaration of Independence. The original cursive is a bit hard. People younger than I won’t be able to read these originals at all, if it’s true that “they” don’t teach cursive anymore.

The Archives’ front side gets 99.9% of the visitors. That’s where the Constitution and all are, along with a waste-of-time exhibition called the Rubinstein Hall or some such name.

The rear side is the Research Center entrance. We went back there, too, thinking to look at microfilms of censuses. Why not?

That Research Center has a strange atmosphere: One part library, one part airport-security-area, two parts prison.

Sign in, get ID card, go through airport-style security, all amid suspicious glares. We did it all. The process took so long that we had to leave before entering the main area. Off to meet A.W.F. & P.F….

Here is a map of the location of the National Archives:

Outside, the Washington Monument is not far away (at left, below). Stone barriers, to prevent anyone driving bombs onto these federal buildings, are along the sidewalks. I don’t think they had those so much when I was young.

Later on, somewhere else, there was this completely-unrelated statue:

February of 2014 was a whirlwind month.

It started like this:

I was flying back to the USA. I flew into New York (much cheaper), then got the bus to Washington. The opportunity to spend a day in New York City was there. I saw my friend T.A.

I would stay at a grey, dreary “hotel” (they were actually shared rooms, so it was a “hostel” — Maybe management ran out of money to pay for that extra letter, S, on the sign).

I arrived on Friday, Jan. 31st (Chinese New Year). Two days later was the Superbowl, an event I beheld with such indifference that I didn’t even know that it was being held in New York City till after my arrival.

In fact, grey, dreary, angry, arrogant New York was not quite as grey, dreary, angry, and arrogant as usual: The festive mood of the Superbowl lifted things up,  I think.

The Superbowl! It’s not quite super enough for non-Americans to care even the smallest bit, though….

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(I ran into a British traveler, huge backpack in tow, at the hostel that evening. He was just stopping over; late that very night, he was on to Mexico. I teased him, “Oh, too bad, you’re going to miss the Superbowl!” I asked him if he was familiar with the sport. His answer was delivered in typical British style: “I know what it is; I’ve never seen it…”). He was from Manchester, and surprised me by declaring himself a fan of the soccer team called “Manchester City”. A British coworker back at the hagwon in Bucheon, also from Manchester, was a “United” fan and hated “City”. I thought that everybody liked “United”. I concede that it makes no sense that a pro sports team would have no fans…I’ll have to rethink this.)

I would meet my Kazakh friend T.A. I would meet him way down at a place with the weird name of “Neck Road”, southern Brooklyn, where he was then working and living. I could make it by subway from the airport. That was my plan. I overestimated my own ability. With two heavy suitcases and seemingly no escalators or elevators in the NY subway system, it required a herculean effort to get there. I was unsure of the right way, and had to transfer several times, lugging the bags.

Two or three hours after leaving the airport arrival area, I arrived at “Neck Road” and met T.A. We walked around Manhattan that evening, as in my previous visit. He took my picture in front of the famous NY Public Library (at right), catching me looking down.

We met T.A.‘s Kyrgyz friend, who is in NY attending some art institute. They speak fluent English but Russian to each other. We had french fries and beer. I was back in the world of tipping. I had to remind myself to do it, when we left.

In our parents’ or grandparents’ generations, Americans and “Soviets” were officially enemies. The three of us are too young to actually remember.

Elsewhere that night, we saw the epicenter of the Superbowl festivities:

You won’t recognize it here, but at right is that famous street called “Broadway”. We passed it only briefly. I once suggested going back, but T.A. and his friend, being from Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan respectively, had even less interest in this Superbowl thing than I did.

It was alluring. I returned the next day (Saturday), alone, in the hours before my bus departed. I walked the entire length. Broadway was converted, that week, into “Superbowl Avenue”, filled with football-related attractions, prize giveaways, tents full of video games to play (with the latest football games), and a lot of other stuff along those lines. Most excitingly was the free “Superbowl pizza”, whatever that is. I didn’t get any on account of the “super”-long line.

I did get some pizza that day, though, which, at $1.00 per slice (tax included), was basically free:

Even McDonald’s put on a big “chicken nugget Superbowl sale”:

All around, that day, people were “cruising around” in football jerseys and hats:

Back home, by bus, it was, on Saturday afternoon.

I didn’t watch more than ten minutes of the Superbowl.

“Analyzing humor is like dissecting a frog. Few people are interested and the frog dies of it.” (E.B. White)

What is “German humor”? I think I can identify it, but I would not hazard to explain it, for a reason something like that “frog problem”. Examples are much better. Here is one (a true story):

I read that anecdote, recently, in a famous war memoir called With Rommel in the Desert by Heinz Werner Schmidt. It’s a line I think I’ve heard before, but that exact line, oddly, produces only a single Google hit as of this writing; that google-hit is from a 1951 Australian newspaper’s “review of new books”! (The author was Rommel’s aide-de-camp in North Africa, later a battalion commander.)

For a war memoir, the book is surprisingly light in tone, peppered with that “German humor” like Rommel’s above remark to that Italian major.

Here is another example. Flies were all over North Africa. Schmidt (the author), e.g., tells a general visiting from Berlin that “the unbearable part of the life [in North Africa] is the aggression of millions of flies. They settle on the food in thousands […]”  [ch.9]. The author relates a farcical scene at the headquarters of one of the Afrika Korps’ constituent divisions. Picture this, sometime in 1941 (In the serious context of a German field command center!) —

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Frivolity or not, Rommel himself actually partook in these “shooting down” sessions:

Being that he is a larger-than-life figure, a legend in his own time, as they say, I find the idea of Rommel sitting around a table swatting flies particularly funny.


Here is another. Rommel was called to Rome to celebrate his 49th birthday in November 1941. The author narrates:

Then there was the mild farce of Rommel’s extensive correspondence. Boys and girls would send him letters, fan mail, really. They asked for photographs. Rommel’s staff actually had thousands of photos on hand, which he would sign and send back! He naturally assigned the drafting of letters to his “aide-de-camp” (the author), though. Imagine what showed up with the mail one day at Rommel’s field headquarters in 1941. A longtime correspondent, who may have been Rommel’s sister (the author didn’t know for sure who it was, but all her letters were jocular) sent a surprise:

It’s getting to be springtime, which is a time when Seoul’s skies have a way of “betaking an awful shade” of orangish-somethingish, allegedly from dust storms way off in China somewhere. One of my first posts here (#12), about this time last year, attempted to document one of those episodes. I was in Korea at the time.

Having been in the USA since January 31st 2014, I missed the most recent episode of this, which was big, sustained. I saw my friend Jared mention it. The “Air-Korea” website confirms it. Pollution data easily accessible there.

Here is the PM-10 air pollution data for February 1st to today, by hour, for “my city”:

The pollution “spike” you see there (yellow and orange) lasted eight full days, from late evening February 21st all the way through till late evening March 1st. (A second [30-hour] spike occurred two days later.)

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March First is “Korean Independence Movement Day”. It’s nice that the pollution decided to lift in line with that holiday. It was even followed by “blue skies” [blue boxes, i.e. clean air] in the AM of March 2nd, even if just briefly.

I think I’m glad I missed this one. It’s quite unhealthy to be in those sustained “orange box” conditions. I remember running late once in Korea (actually running, too, to make time), on a day pollution was at those levels. I wasn’t in bad shape, either. I started to cough pretty quickly. Not good.

It’s in the 60s Fahrenheit (15-20 C) here in Arlington, Va., as I write, after snow last week. I’m pretty sure that most places in the USA (including Arlington) would have blue boxes on the above chart most every day.

Very few people today know the name George Kennan.

He was in the U.S. foreign service in the 1920s-1940s, ambassador to the USSR for a time, a great linguist, and a great thinker; a brilliant man. He was one of the USA’s foremost experts on European affairs, especially Russian affairs. His wife was Norwegian. He drew up the USA’s “containment” doctrine and the Marshall Plan, essentially laying the groundwork for fifty years of U.S. policy in Europe (which became anachronistic after 1991 but sort continued on in mutated form anyway; I wonder what Kennan thought about the interventions in Yugoslavia? Kosovo? Crimea?).

Kennan was one of the only voices in the U.S. government in 1945 and early 1946 who warned that Stalin was not to be trusted, that Stalin was aggressive and intransigent.

It sounds like Kennan was a “good old fashioned” American patriot. He was not. Recently I read (some of) a book called George Kennan: A Study of Character by John Lukacs (2007). In it, we see that Kennan actually grew to dislike the USA:

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This part I found particularly interesting:

This view of “an automobile-dependent society as a weak one” is a view I’ve held for years. My experience traveling abroad and living/working abroad has only strengthened this view, to me. Kennan saw this in its embryonic stage. He lived long enough (he continued writing into the the 2000s) to see it in its advanced form. He was right about a lot.

Kennan did remain loyal to the USA, of course. This is fascinating to me. What makes a man loyal to a state or other organization? How long till the organization changes for “the worse” so much that loyalty of principle wavers and then breaks?

Fareed Zakaria, U.S. media darling, wags his finger disapprovingly at recently-revealed comments made by Kennan:

From the little I’ve seen of Kennan’s late writings, he probably did steadily lose loyalty to the USA. That is just my own conjecture, though. He lived a long life, and his boyhood in the 1910s simply bore no resemblance at all to the USA in which he died, in the 1980s, 1990s, 2000s.

This picks up where post-199 (“CELTA Last Day”) left off.

Our end-of-CELTA celebratory dinner was “Himalayan” Indian food (suggested by A.W.F.), which was excellent:

It was various kinds of naan (Indian bread), rice, and various shared dishes, mainly vegetarian and one or two meat (A.W.F. and K.T. don’t eat meat).

At right in the picture above, you can see “Taj Mahal beer”. It was, surprisingly to me, not bad. (Then again, I considered Korean beer to be pretty okay, an opinion I kept well-concealed from other foreigners there, among whom its popularity was similar to anchovies as a pizza topping. What I really liked, I think, was the price [around $2.50 for Korean beer vs. $5.00 for imported].)

Sitting to my left was the loquacious J.F., whom I discussed in post-199 at length.

This evening, amiable J.F. was excited! When he gets excited, all his sentences end like this one! And this one! Hah. And so it happened that, having gotten some of the “spring” back in his step, J.F. started telling some of his famous stories (like his “How I Came to Fall Off a Hawaiian Waterfall” anecdote):

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J.F.’s stories follow a pattern: A slow start, an increasingly-rapid delivery, building to a point where he gets so excited that he begins to raise his voice to a level near shouting.

Now, this Indian restaurant has those cloth napkins you’re supposed to daintily put on your lap. Having those napkins is, of course, a way of saying “no shouting, please”. As J.F.’s latest story was crescendoing, M.F. and A.W.F. (two of the other CELTA classmates, sitting across from us) started to giggle and look embarrassed. M.F.  gestured to J.F. to “quiet down”. The manager came over. In J.F.’s typical style, he proceeded to smoothly talk his way out of it. He immediately shook the man’s hand and started asking the man questions about his life, as if that were the natural and appropriate thing to do in this case. We all sat by, half-laughing at the absurdity of it.

After eating, we went to a nearby bar for a short time, and then A.W.F. had to leave us.

I suggested going to a karaoke bar, as several were nearby. I have good memories of them from South Korea (although in Korea, they are private “singing rooms”, not an open bar). The suggestion was jumped upon by the music-oriented M.H., who played professionally in a band. J.F. was all for it, too, and K.T. followed. The four of us soon entered one.

J.F. turned out to be a great singer, especially of his chosen “Sail Away“. M.H.sang very well, too, but I’d expected that given his background in music. I joined in on the songs I knew. There was one group of Blacks that kept selecting “Hip-Hop” songs, an odd departure from the choices of the Whites, who mainly chose ’80s music, for some reason.

(Sidenote: A human was in charge of loading the songs. I wondered why. People could very easily punch in the codes by themselves for their songs. I realized why, when I saw that “tips” were obligatory. Having a human there coldly demanding “tips” for each song is just…a naked money grab. Think about it, fifteen songs per hour at $5+ per song, yikes, that’s $75/hour! Do that just two or three nights a week and you’re already past $1,000, for doing…nothing.)

At 11:30 PM, we left and walked together to the Metro. I continued on to the bus station, where I met my friend J.S. who had arrived about 11:50 PM. He was visiting me from Roanoke, Va., which kept me busy Saturday and Sunday…

Friends…?
This post is categorized (among others) under “Friends“. The fact is, though, that I didn’t know any of these people before the CELTA course started on February 3rd, just one month ago. The six of us became “friends”, at least for the duration. We are too different to actually be friends, I think, but we did share an intense experience together and came to appreciate each other, and feel a mutual connection; “we were all in it together”.

The Korean language has a word for this. That word is “Juhng” [정] a kind of emotional attachment based around recognition of shared experience and appreciation thereof, with more intense experiences yielding stronger juhng. See also post-50 and post-65 for my comments on this concept. (Note: This word is usually written today as jeong, but as I dislike this spelling and choose to use my own made-up transliteration in my own little forum here. Sorry to fans of the “jeong” transliteration. The pronunciation is like “young” but replacing the ‘y’ with our English ‘j’ sound.)

At one point, I tried to explain juhng to the others at our celebratory dinner, and how/why I thought we had it. Only A.W.F. seemed to get what I was saying.

I can only wonder if I will see any of these people much again, but I won’t forget them.

On Friday, February 28th, I (we) finished the CELTA course in Washington D.C. Here we were, with the students:

There is a lot I can say about CELTA, but to keep a manageable length I’ll limit this to only a description of our last day:

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Our last day was (for once) very relaxed for all of us “trainees”, except for J.F., pictured at left in the striped sweater. If he looks like a football player, that’s just because he was one, fifteen years ago in college.

Also pictured there are several “practice students” (from left): H.B.Y., a friendly Chinese man in his 30s; A.L., a Camerooni living in Madagascar on a longterm visit to the USA; B.K., a Buddhist monk-missionary from Sri Lanka; and in the corner is S.M. from Lebanon; we also see the back of A.S. from Japan’s head. (As you can tell, this lower-intermediate class was legitimately international. East-Asians were the biggest “bloc”, but only formed 25%-30% of the class, usually). Also pictured is the “Willard Hotel” sign I made to help with A.W.F.’s excellent final lesson (finding directions and sightseeing around Washington).

Anyway. Yes, J.F. had to teach on our last day. His teaching style changed a lot during the course. I remember a lot of comical shouting, arm waving, excitement, and a “game” atmosphere, often even during grammar explanations. (He describes his own personality as “the crazy uncle”, whatever that means.) That was then. By the later teaching-practice sessions, especially his last, J.F. had reduced this stuff to very near zero.

If you ask me, J.F. got too subdued. I’d guess that he was sternly told by our first-half trainer to calm things down. He got the message and gradually cut out the energy that animated him in the early lessons. The lessons became better in a way (more focused) but at the cost of the fun. In the world of the Internet, if a real-life teacher cannot provide a dynamic classroom environment, why even have the teacher? Students can watch online videos for passive, detached learning.

Hmm, I think I ought to remind myself that I am trying to describe our last CELTA day, and not analyze J.F.’s teaching or wade into the deep, fast-moving, shark-filled waters of education theory.

The teaching was, as always, in the afternoon. I didn’t yet mention the morning. Back to that: Our last morning was marked by a lot of paper work, chitchat, writing of addresses, more chitchat, signing of documents, questions-and-answers about jobs, and then pizza.

At our suggestion, the two trainers, C.K. and R.P., agreed to eat lunch (pizza) with us. Snacks appeared (most from me, including Thai “chicken-flavored peanuts”, much-chuckled-about, that I got either in Malaysia or Thailand in November. The nuts smelled like popcorn but tasted okay). The drinks were flat Coke Zero and Pepsi Max, left over from the “taste test” I’d done in my last teaching session two days earlier. You can see the bottles there, on the cart that normally holds a projector. It was fun.

At one point before this, we had to make posters giving advice to future CELTA trainees. Here are ours:

The one at left was, conceptually, a collaboration between J.F. and myself.

There are a series of steps (one for each “teaching practice”). A little character stands on each, looking up towards the next step. He holds a different balloon each time, with what we thought was helpful at that stage — i.e., something that would “lift” the guy to the next step, The first step is biggest, and that balloon says “C.K.”, our first trainer and current head of the Washington D.C. center (with whom I didn’t exactly see eye to eye on certain things). Another has the name of a useful grammar book, “Grammar in Use”. “R.P.” appears near the middle (he was our second-half trainer and very friendly/helpful/supportive). The little man has a few “zzz’s” in the middle steps. Accordingly, two of the balloons near the top say “coffee” and “more coffee”. The last ballon says “Triumph of Perseverance”. At the top, the little man says “I made it!”

We’d all made it. (Students sometimes fail and have to retake it.)

All that was left was to watch J.F.’s lesson. In the last slot, which would’ve been S.R.’s, we played a game all together, both students and teachers, competing for candy. He’d been the only teacher that day, so J.F. led the game with a return of that early energy (after the trainer had left!). The game was great, especially after the candy appeared.

Not long afterwards came the obligatory group picture:

Not long after this, we left the building for the last time, riding down in its unusual rectangular-shaped elevator. For the first time, we’d all left together, off to celebrate…!

Continued with post-class activities:
Post-200 (“Celebrating CELTA in Himalayan Style”)

On Sunday, February 23rd, 2014, the smoke over Ukraine seemed to be clearing, after a wild week.

Some Ukrainians far off in Washington D.C. were apparently celebrating the revolution, in the typical manner people celebrate World Cup victories:

These (presumably-pro-revolution) Ukrainians were walking past one of those new “bikeshare” stands.

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I was in downtown Washington, D.C. to collaborate with my “teaching partner” for our lesson on Monday. I was to teach the first half, and he (M.H.) taught the second half of (what we made as) one long lesson. (We collaborated closely and created quite a great one. I was highly satisfied with the way it turned out.)

I walked around the streets of downtown Washington D.C. (eerily empty on the weekend) after leaving M.H.  It was then that I saw the “flag wearer” above. I got on the Metro and rode off to join my father and some of the church people for dinner (D.L. and the J.D. family).

It was a busy day, in which I entered and exited the District of Columbia twice, a rare thing for me. I seemed to be zipping around all the time the whole day. That very morning — about dawn — I’d gone to the train station to help my mother with her train ride to Connecticut. She will be there helping her sister for a few weeks, at least….

News of the Ukrainian Revolution of February 2014 continues to capture much of what free time I have these days.

To those who read my post-193 (“Ukrainian Insurgent Army, 1940s and 2010s”) and doubted that they were actually looking at the flag of the WWII-era, anti-Soviet, wildly-anti-Communist, pro-German [“collaborationist”] nationalist-paramilitary group called the Ukrainian Insurgent Army [UIA], see here:

I saw today a video put out by “Right Sector” which essentially names the UIA as a forerunner of its own group. Right Sector uses the UIA flag, actually, which explains why it showed up atop Kiev’s anti-government barricades.

I’d never heard of “Right Sector” before last week. It is a Ukrainian street-gang-style nationalist group, and seems to be a kind of armed wing of a political party (Svoboda) that got 11% of the vote two years ago. Russian media, in their typical form, calls them “neo-Nazis” (a term that the Russian media also applies to the meek Estonians).

Reading between the lines, Right Sector does seem to have instigated the major fighting in Kiev last week. They charged the police lines, killed several police, took scores more “hostage”at one point, and provoked the huge counter-attack. Some of their units, meanwhile, had ‘liberated’ a large armory in Lvov (western Ukraine). The weapons began to move towards Kiev. Seeing a determined, disciplined, now-better-armed, fanatical foe, for whom fear of death was not a strong deterrent, the kleptocrats of the Ukrainian government folded; the kleptocrat-in-chief disappeared. As of this writing, headlines are saying that President Yanukovich’s “whereabouts are unknown”.

Here is the video released three days ago by Right Sector, featuring one of its “commanders” [2:19, w/English subtitles]. The video seems to be an introduction to Right Sector, explaining what its goals and views are.

As this video may likely one day disappear, here is my attempt to describe it and transcribe the provided subtitles:

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[Bold is what is spoken/subtitled]   [Bracketed: My description of what is happening on screen]

“Textual Transliteration” of the Right Sector Video

[Title of the video; a serious-sounding voice narrates] The Great Ukrainian Reconquista….

What is Right Sector fighting for?

[The camera cuts to a grizzled, tough-looking man, about 40, who sits at a desk, his hands on the table in non-clenched fists. He wears a wedding band on his finger and a brown, militaryesque shirt. Behind him there is a red-and-black flag with the words “Right Sector” (in Cyrilic) across the middle, with a sword emblem between the two words. When he begins to speak, he maintans a steady gaze at the camera. He speaks in a serious and official tone, as one would expect an actual military commander to speak]

[The man speaks] “We are the fighters and commanders of Right Sector. We remember the heroic struggles of Svyatoslav Khorobry and Danyl Halytsky, Bohdan Khmelnytsky, and the fighters of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army. We stand for the right of the people to revolt against injustice. We are conscious of the responsibility to the dead and disabled heroes of Maidan [the large Kiev square which was the site of the anti-government protests of November 2013 to February 2014, and the epicenter of the Ukrainian revolution of Feb. 2014].

“We fight!” [Video footage of street fighting is shown without narration; one scene shows a masked man throwing a firebomb; hundreds of police in anti-riot gear are shown; another scene shows masked men (RS members?) pushing a policeman to the ground and beating him]

[Narration returns] We stand for the right of every Ukrainian citizen to be treated with human dignity.

We demand that the “Berkut” (Ukrainian riot police) by criminally prosecuted for their repression of the movement. We stand against the humiliation and the impoverishment of the Ukrainian people. [A man without a shirt on shown amid light snow; he is a prisoner; he is hit on the head and beaten by a masked “Berkut” policeman; other scenes of the “Berkut” in armored vehicles follow.]

We stand against the state’s war against its own people. We stand for the direct election of judges. We stand against corrupt “phony democracy”. We stand against degeneracy and against “totalitarian liberalism”.

We stand for traditional national morality and family values [images of young couples embracing, and young children smiling are shown]. We stand for large Ukrainian families, and for a physically and spiritually healthy youth. [Images of young male RS members, masked and in combat pose, are shown].  We stand against the “cult of corruption” and against moral depravity. [Footage of scantilty-dressed singers at a concert is shown].

We stand against any multinational integration plans that would dictate to Ukraine what to do. [A short video clip of Putin is shown during the preceding line; then, immediately afterward, of EU officials under an EU flag].

[A huge nighttime rally with large numbers of Ukrainian flags waving] We stand for unity; for the greatness of the Ukrainian nation. We are for a Ukrainian, and a European, “Reconquista”! [Images of RS fighters with shields bearing the “Black Sun” emblem are shown; a “Celtic Cross” is briefly shown.]

[The intense-looking man from the early part of the clip returns on screen] “Now is just the beginning. The beginning of the revival of the Kyivska Rus.

The revival of Europe starts — with our Maidan! [End of Video]

I feel more personally optimistic today than I did in the mid-2000s. The overall mood in the post-2008 world, though, is a lot more pessimistic.

It’s all about falling expectations, isn’t it. Ukraine is a case of this, I think. As of this writing (Saturday, Feb. 22nd, 2014), it seems that Ukraine has just undergone a nationalistic “revolution”, with echoes of 1989. Ukraine wasn’t doing so well in the 1980s, but, incredibly, in 2014 it has a substantially lower GDP-per-capita than it did in 1989! (See post-194).

I saw a poll showing that an incredible five-out-of-six White-Americans say that they are dissatisfied “with the way things are going” in the USA. Here is the breakdown by the various listed demographic groupings:

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Demographic Groups that Think the USA is Going in the WRONG Direction:
          Overall: 32-to-10 [say that the USA is going in the wrong direction]
          Men: 40-to-10
          Women: 27-to-10

          Whites: 48-to-10
          Hispanics: 19-to-10

          Republicans: 133-to-10
          Independents: 46-to-10
          Democrats: 12-to-10

Demographic Groups that Think the USA is Going in the RIGHT Direction:
          Blacks: 11-to-10 [say that the USA is going in the right direction]

Here is the relevant excerpt from the poll:

Gallup also asks this question in polls. It has “mood of the country” polling data for 1979-2014 online. Gallup corroborates the Quinnipiac poll, as it also finds the “mood of the country” today to be about 32-to-10 pessimistic.

This reminds me of a nice song, a lively song of nostalgic-lament, from the mid-2000s, by Guy Forsyth (b.1968):

I first heard this song in 2006. It really “spoke” to me at that time. It still does.

On the line “we used to dream about heroes”: At one point in early 2012, when I was working in Bucheon, Korea, I found and played the Davey Crockett song. An American coworker/friend, C.H. from California (now in China), commented to the effect that the song comes from “a totally different nation” than the USA that exists today.

It’s a “road-goes-on-forever-in-my-mind” kind of song:

We got bad news on Thursday.

I walked out of the elevator and into the institute at 8:50 AM, to find the main room deserted. Where is everybody? I put my bag down. Something felt “off”. Down the hallway appeared A.F. (an effervescent veteran of musical theater, and one of the six CELTA candidates in our group). She said something that truly stunned me:

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“[S.R.]’s brother was killed!”

“What!?” I said. 

A.F., for the first time ever, looked sad to me as she spoke those words. She beckoned for me to follow. I followed. Down the hallway, I soon saw S.R. The others were huddled around. (I was the last to arrive this day).

S.R. is a kind, talkative, motherly type, in her late 30s, from Indiana. She’d b(r)ought me coffee the day before. I’d asked for “just coffee”, but she’d insisted on “caramel chocolate latte” (which I’d never had). She went out, paid for it, brought it back up, handed it to me, smiling. That is the kind of person she is. “Christian-Charity” ought to be her middle name.

For about twenty minutes, we stood around, listening, and trying to console S.R., as she talked about her murdered brother (age 21, the youngest of S.R.’s eight siblings). At that time, he’d been dead for only seven or so hours. As she was leaving, she informed us that we could “look it up on google” using the keywords of his name and the town. It seems surreal that news of a death, including all the full names, would already be online so soon.

Thus, S.R. had to abruptly leave our month-long intensive course. By our lunch break, she was on an airplane. She will deal with the funeral and all. She won’t finish the course with us. I hope they let her finish at some later time. She has done so much work for it so far… She was actually due to teach that day. She and I, in fact, shared a lesson. I would cover the grammar part, and she would come on after and do the “productive task” (speaking/writing).

In the moments after A.F. gave the news, my mind jumped to Ukraine. As it happens, S.R. has spent a few years in Ukraine. She had to leave in late November 2013 to escape the political crisis. She has been teaching, as part of a church mission organization, in the eastern (pro-Russian) part of Ukraine, but she told me that the anti-government side is totally in the right, in her view. She loves Ukraine.  I can only wonder if I will ever see her again.

These numbers are amazing to me:

          Ukraine, 1989 vs. 2013
            When 1989’s figures are 100

            Ukraine’s Population
             1989: 100
             2013: 88

            Ukraine’s GDP [adjusted for inflation]
            1989: 100
            2013: 67

             Ukraine’s Per-capita GDP [adjusted for inflation]
             1989: 100
             2013: 76
 
Ukrainians under age 35 have no memory of (sustained) good times, and even those in their 40s today have no experience of sustained good times during which they were in the labor market. Falling expectations lead to this:

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Population: Ukraine had 51.5 million people in its 1989 census; today, it has 45.5 million. This is all because of low birth rates. The World Bank predicts it will further decline to 36 million by 2050.

GDP: According to this graph (and this one from the World Bank), Ukraine’s real-GDP today is only 67% of its 1989 level. If it had remained exactly the same on a per-capita basis, we would expect Ukraine’s real GDP (“real” meaning adjusted for inflation) to also be 88%of the 1989 level, but it’s a lot lower.

If the average Ukrainian in 1989 made 100 units of money, today (adjusted for inflation) he makes only 76. (=.669/.88).

Everyone knows about the major contraction in the ex-Communist-bloc in the 1990s: I see from the historical data that Ukraine’s economy by 1999 had sunk to a pathetic 39% of its 1989 level. Then there was a period of growth (2000-2007), but the 2008-to-Present worldwide economic problems have caused zero GDP growth since 2007 for that country. In terms of Ukraine’s GDP, 2014’s is about equal to 2006’s. (This is true of a lot of countries.)

An anti-government barricade, in Kiev, in one the past few wild days in that city:

This is a still from the 2:05 mark in this video (graphic content), from the Russia Today world-news service. If you look closely at the video footage, you see a red-and-black flag, flying high and clear, at the center. A closer shot (top left):

What is this red-and-black flag? I wondered. I searched. I found it:

It belonged to the The Ukrainian Insurgent Army [UIA]. The UIA was a radically-anti-Communist, nationalistic paramilitary group in the 1940s, whose goal was the elimination of Communism and the overthrow of Soviet rule. The UIA was the “military wing” of a Ukrainian nationalist political party. They were actively pro-German in WWII.

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It’s an oddly-untold story, which I first learned when in Estonia in 2007: An enormous number of non-German Europeans volunteered to serve, under arms, “with the Germans” in WWII (i.e., to fight against the USSR). There were entire Ukrainian divisions in the field, outfitted and supplied by the Germans. (Most European nations had at least one full regiment (thousands of men), I’ve learned; there were even a couple of Norwegian regiments; Norwegians formed the core of a division nicknamed Nordland . In my time in Berlin, I came across the dramatic history of Nordland’s last stand in the April 1945 Battle of Berlin.

Half a million non-Germans served in foreign divisions to fight in the East. “Better dead than Red”, they said.

These thoughts occur to me, as I hear news that seems very much like war coverage:

Spotting the flag of this “Ukrainian Insurgent Army” suggests that things are not quite as the U.S. media wants/is-able-to report. The hard-core of the anti-government side probably doesn’t want some kind of soft-bellied, free-market, “gay-rights” liberal-democracy. No; no. They don’t want that, at all, I’m thinking.

Today is the holiday commonly known as “Presidents’ Day” (a confusing holiday). I still go in to “work”.

A funny thing about Presidents’ Day is that more than one presidential birthday is being celebrated, i.e. Washington’s (Feb. 22) and Lincoln’s (Feb. 12) — formerly two separate holidays in many states.

However, states have all different names for this day, including the formerly-Southern state of Virginia. (Formerly because in the mid-2010s here, with Northern Virginia’s millions of people, Virginia is tipping into being something else.)

Virginia calls it “George Washington Day”, excluding old Honest Abe.

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Virginia also celebrates “Lee-Jackson Day” (two Confederate generals), instead of “Martin Luther King Jr. Day”.

That was a Richmond decision, though. Typical Northern Virginians of the 2010s here would cringe at “Lee-Jackson Day”. I remember when I was at college in Northern Virginia, the local college authorities had to decide to give only one Monday off in the spring semester and axe the other: MLK Day or Presidents’ Day (i.e., “George Washington Day”). They decided to retain MLK Day and have classes as-normal on Presidents’ Day. (I remember Arlington Public Schools similarly refusing to touch MLK Day when snow-days called for one holiday to be cancelled.) The move by the college prompted a professor of Geography, one of my favorites, a part-AmericanIndian from Oklahoma, to criticize their PC decision: If you’re deciding who is more important to the history of the USA, how can MLK possibly take precedence over George Washington?

The excellent Korean politics and history blog, Popular Gusts, found this image from 1990:

This attitude remains strong in South Korea even into the mid-2010s.

The entire Left and much of the Right (except its leadership) share this attitude. It may be the most-vigorous strand of Korean political thought that I noticed. It may “come from” the left-wing, but as its real appeal is on nationalistic-racialistic grounds, the right-wing “doth not protest too much”. There thus being little opposition, conformism takes care of any stragglers who didn’t get the memo (the apolitical, not-particularly-racialistic bloc).

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There are so many examples I could cite, from my time in Korea. One is the U.S. Beef Ban. Many may not remember this, but American beef was banned for years in Korea, and it is still, in some ways, defacto banned, after a phony “crisis” was manufactured a few years ago about American beef allegedly being tainted.

In reaction to that “crisis”, they passed a law requiring that all restaurants and markets post their meat-products’ countries of origin. In my time in Korea, from 2009 to 2014 (not all consecutive), never once did I ever see any restaurant selling a beef-product from the USA, from the cheap “분식” [minute-food] places to the “meat buffets” to even American chain restaurants like “T.G.I. Friday’s”. Some had American pork, but none ever had American beef.

I saw this at a Lotteria fast-food restaurant:

On the wrapper is an official-seeming seal certifying that this burger has Australian beef, which is “clean and safe”

The full phrase in Korean is “호주청정우”. I recognize the first word as “Australia”, and the last word as [an abbreviated way to say] “Beef”. My dictionary translates the middle word, “청정”, as “pure, immaculate, clean, spotless, stainless, unsullied, undefiled, unpolluted.” By implication, U.S. beef is the opposite of those things.

Korean-grown beef is way too expensive to be economical. Lotteria now sells a “Hanwoo burger” — Hanwoo means “Korean-grown beef”. It’s far-and-away their most-expensive menu item.

Here is another part of the 1990 cartoon distributed to students:

This cartoon’s pictures are self-explanatory. “If we open our market to foreign foods, all the Korean farms will fail, farm babies will starve, and we will be dependent on foreigners for food”. The last box features a man in a traditional Korean outfit pleading for “A bit of rice, please”. The White man in the boat (who is smoking a pipe in the style of the famous photos of General MacArthur) mockingly glowers down at him. “How much ya got?”

Translation
White Man: [Scheming] “Let’s make it expensive”.
Korean: [In Panic and Despair] “How can we survive if it costs so much?”
White Man: [Haughtily] “If you think it’s expensive, then don’t buy it!” [Whistles]

(But thanks, anyway, for the trillions in net aid [in today’s dollars] you’ve given us, for your ongoing military protection, for liberating us from Japan, and for saving us from Communism….)

It snowed a lot in Washington, D.C. and shut down most things on Feb. 13th in 2014 (see post-188) and also on one of the Feb. 13ths in the 1980s. The snowstorm notwithstanding, that Feb. 13th back in the ’80s was my most active day in life up to that point….as it was my very first.

I don’t know how, but someone in the CELTA group found out that Thursday was my birthday. They insisted on having a ‘party’. Pictured at left are J.F. (standing; going to Japan in March), A.F. (blue striped shirt), and S.R. (semi-hidden). In the center are bottles of orange and apple juice presented as gifts, which we shared. (In the background is the white board. Nametags of “practice students” are to the right of it. Lot of chairs, with those impossibly-small foldable-desks attached, are all around.)

The balloons were yet to come:

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On Friday, Feb. 14th, back came the “practice students”, adult foreigners of an “upper-intermediate” English ability (they had not come on the 13th, see the very end of post-188). To my surprise, they, too, had presents for me, in the form of six or seven balloons and a small cake (at left). Also, a card signed in various languages by most students.

I’ve only seen these students for two weeks, and I’ve only taught them five times, but they seem to really like me.

The cake was excellent.

Four of the balloons survive, as I write this.

I got good wishes from many people via Facebook, though as I avoid logging into Facebook, I haven’t acknowledged them. I also got a book-collection of Washington Post newspaper front pages from the 1940s, an excellent present, from my mother.

February 13th, 2014’s big snowstorm in Washington cancelled most things, but not my thing. Out I went.

I was delighted, in a way, to be able to walk along the roads (note the vantage point of the photo below).

The two human figures above are firefighters. One is using a snowblower. The other is by the door. I heard the snowblower tell the other guy that he could “go back in and watch the [Olympic] hockey”.

I arrived around 8:30 AM and descended into an empty subway station:

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The station was almost empty, at a time when the platform is usually teeming with people. I heard the statistic later that AM ridership was at 6% of the normal weekday morning level. There normally are around a hundred people in one subway car during rush hour; on Thursday Feb. 13, mine had eight (I counted). Here was my subway car:

By late morning, the temperature got above freezing and the roads looked passable in downtown Washington:

Only three of the six of us studying for the CELTA certificate made it in on time by 9 AM. One other (J.F.) did make it in, but well past 11 AM. He was stuck in New Carollton after several cars skidded and crashed ahead of him. Those behind (J.F. included), now stranded, spent a long while trying to extricate the stuck cars to open the road again. The other two (M.H. and K.T.) didn’t come at all, despite being told they must. Their vehicles were wedged-in by ice.

The lessons here are two:
(1) It’s a better idea to not rely on a personal automobile in very many cases, and this is one. The three who made it on time [myself included] relied only on their two feet and on the subway (to its credit, the subway ran normally, at least the Orange Line did– however, all local buses were cancelled). The three who didn’t make it all had cars involved in their commutes (all drive to, or are driven to, subway stations) to come downtown.

(2) Things are cancelled for a reason during inclement weather! (Look at what happened to J.F., as described above).

We couldn’t do our afternoon practice teaching, because of the sixteen “practice students”, only the Slovak and two Russians said they would come, an insufficient number. Being unaccustomed to snow, every last one of the many Latin people “threw in the towel” (as well as the Japanese woman). We went home early.